Apple Review #11: Holstein (With bonus Ruminations On Art Vs Audience)

The push and pull of art is, I think, the part where you do it for yourself versus where you do it for other people.

And yes, this is sort of about me making my weird apple videos.

And no, I don’t think my weird apple videos are art.

Bear with me.

When we talk about art and writing and the making of cool things we sometimes frame it as ART vs COMMERCE, but I think that’s a bit of a false dichotomy — or, at least, the deeper struggle is that thing I said at the fore: making it for yourself versus making it for an audience. Commerce in that sense is represented by audience — the thing you make? You want it to be seen or heard or experienced, and in theory (and in hope) someone is willing to throw money at you for that thing. At the same time, you had to kind of get there on your own, somehow. You had a love of a thing and at some point just wanted to make the thing, do the thing, be the thing, without necessarily having that muddied by the expectations of a mass, invisible, unknowable audience.

It’s important to find that balance. I expect that people who just make art for themselves — they’re probably pretty happy about it, I guess, and I don’t think it’s wrong to be that way or approach the making of cool things in that manner. On the other hand, art is so keenly part of the human experience and the human connection — you make a thing, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes quite on purpose, in order to put this squirming tether into the world in the hopes that your seeking tendril finds another seeking tendril and forms a connection. I often say storytelling is a shout in the dark: you’re hoping someone will hear you, and shout back. It’s an exhortation against loneliness, but it’s also fine if it’s an emblem of that loneliness, instead. Just you making something in the midst of your own existence, kept and considered only by you.

On the other hand, I think there are people who only care about the audience (or, the crass version, only care about the money and attention it brings). I don’t think this is wrong or bad, either — it just is. I think the danger is maybe you have no creative True North, right? You’re just a compass spinning, willing to make whatever others want rather than having any kind of perspective or an angle that’s yours or anything lensed through the unique human experience that is you. You want to please everyone, but that’s impossible, and at a certain point one of the things that actually attracts other humans to your work is how you parse an idea through all the squishy gnarly filters that comprise your heart and mind. They want the weird shape your own personal Play-Doh Shape-Making Factory extrudes, y’know?

I knew someone in the game writing space Way Back When who was genuinely a very very good writer but had little interest in doing what outlines asked of him and didn’t really like editorial notes or feedback from anyone, and as a result was in this space of making his own content by resisting the audience (and, further, the client). I also know writers who are like freelance guns-for-hire, and will write anything at all for anyone — not just for the paycheck but just to say YES to whatever comes across their door, and ultimately I think the work can end up reading a little hollow because it doesn’t have that mark of their own individual spiritual-emotional-intellectual fingerprint. There’s just no special sauce, you know? Like it’s missing a bit of soul. Again, there’s no wrong to any of this — it’s all about choice and who you are as a maker of cool things, but at the end of the day, for me, the goal is to find the balance of making stuff I want to make and making stuff people want to in some way experience. Letting my own freak flag fly, but also hoping very hard it looks like your freak flag, a little bit, too.

So anyway yeah okay I’ll still make my doofy little apple videos. I like making ’em and some folks seem to like watching ’em so away we go.

And now, an apple review.

My review of a Holstein apple from Scott Farm, VT, rec’d late Sept:

No, it’s not a cow.

It moos not, for ’tis an apple.

There is frankly nothing cow-like about the apple, not in taste or smell or appearance. Fruit is mysterious!

Anyway.

The Holstein — or the Holsteiner Cox, the Holsteinerapfel — is a German apple that either has Cox’s Orange Pippin as a parent or was a sport of the Cox’s. (A sport is a random genetic mutation that produces a divergent fruit, and then you take that sucker and graft its branches onto another tree to continue this new alternate universe version of the original fruit. Because clearly mutations are actually just intrusions from an alternate dimension. This is just science, you cannot disagree.)

I am ever a fan of this apple — it’s very much like the Cox’s Orange Pippin, usually just bigger, and sometimes with punchier flavors. It’s often an aromatic apple (which is a romantic way of saying smelly but in a good way) — tropical fruit forward with big pineapple karate happening in the mouth. Usually got a big burst of juice. (I was going to say, “it’s a squirter,” but I didn’t, and you’re welcome.) Further, it’s a fairly pretty apple. A little lopsidey, maybe, but that gives it character — and it takes the blushing orange of the Cox’s and dials it up, brighter, sunnier, bolder.

This batch brought all of that. And it also brought some curious additions.

I ate two out of the three I have and both had these, ahh, additions.

First: smell, very buttery pineapple smell.

Second: the bite. First apple was a bit softer, second apple, firmer. The first apple seems to be on its way out of the Zone of Deliciousness in terms of its time off the tree. Gonna judge more on the second apple regarding its score, but both were coarse-grained, and if this apple wore Yoga pants, those pants would have JUICY written across in the ass in a jaunty cursive font.

Third: the flavor, you know, yeah, it’s pineapple, it’s a bit vanilla-sugar-cookie, it’s a little lemon-orange brightness, though not as bright as some have been, not quite buzzing on the lips.

And now, the weird part.

Both apples had this smell-slash-taste that on the video I kind of described as a bleachy, cleaning detergenty vibe, but umm, there’s also something else it reminds me of? If you know, some trees (like old chestnut trees, RIP the American Chestnut, also please watch this fascinating video about the American Chestnut tree and efforts to bring it back from its weird interstitial realm of not-quite-extinct) when they blossom have an, uhhh, odor, that some have described to smell a little like, err, well, ahh, let’s call it jizz. So, this apple brought a little of that. Not a lot! Just, “what if vanilla jizz were a scent at Yankee Candle?”

And then the second apple also brought with it this faintly sulfurous eggy hell-stink with it. Just a moment’s whiff. So brief you barely notice it but also it’s an eggy hell-stink, so you’re gonna notice it.

What’s fascinating is, when I peeled the rest of each, these off-flavors dissipated. I’m not entirely sure why that is, as I am no APPLEOLOGIST and merely an AMATEUR HOUR APPLE ADVENTURER, and though I am head of the APPLE SNACK GANG, that confers upon me no special knowledge! But! I do know that the skin contains a lot of zesty molecules and volatile esters concentrated there, and so certainly the skin brings different flavors and scents to the party, and removing the skin and revealing only the sweet precious apple meat isolates different expressions.

Whatever. Anyway. Once peeled, they got infinitely more pleasing.

So, I’m still gonna call these an 8.2, even though on a better year they’d be a full point or more higher.

(Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem)

Holstein: Not a cow, nor a pineapple, peel for maximum non-jizziness?